Current MLB ballpark · 1990 – present · MLB tenancy 1998 – present

Tropicana Field

St. Petersburg, FL

Opened: 1990
Capacity: 25,025
Surface: Artificial Turf
Roof: Dome
League: AL
Elevation: 15 ft
Orientation: 359° (N)
Time zone: America/New_York

How it plays

Every number is an index where 100 is league average. There is no such thing as one park factor — this park does different things to a triple than it does to a home run, and the only honest version is the whole row. Off 14,992 plate appearances in 2026.

	2026	2024-2026
Runs	100	94
Home runs	114	105
Triples	90	106
Doubles	111	96
Singles	99	98
Walks	83	91
Strikeouts	99	103
Value on contact	102	99
Expected on contact	101	99

How much of this is the park? Across 2022–2026, this venue's single-season value-on-contact index moved by ±2.5 points (a 6-point spread over 4 seasons). The league median is 3.0. Read a single season's figure with that much slack in it — the walls do not move, and the number does.

By the batter's side

Runs	110 RHB	88 LHB
Home runs	135 RHB	94 LHB
Value on contact	108 RHB	95 LHB

7,600 right-handed and 7,392 left-handed plate appearances — each side is half a season, so read these with at least the slack the combined figures carry — the band above is ±2.5 on twice this sample.

What FVR does about it

Every luck gap we measure at this park has −0.0041 subtracted from it, off 3,736 balls in play here this season. That is the number behind every board on this site, which is the only reason it is printed. It is not on the 100-is-average scale above: it is value on contact per ball in play, so it cannot be added to or subtracted from any index in this table. The two can even point opposite ways — Savant's runs index counts all offense, ours is only the residual against what the batted balls deserved.

Index figures: Baseball Savant, single-season and three-year rolling. What a park factor is, and is not →

The lore

Four Rings Over the Turf

The dome built to dodge thunderstorms became a park where the roof is part of the ground rules.

Four Rings

Four catwalks hang above the artificial turf at Tropicana Field, and the ground rules they require exist nowhere else. A fair ball striking the lower two rings — C and D — is a home run. A fair ball that hits or lodges on the upper two, A and B, is in play or a ground-rule double. The roof those catwalks hang from is the world's largest cable-supported dome, tilted at a 6.5-degree angle that drops from 225 feet above second base to 85 feet at the center-field wall.

City officials chose a fixed dome because of the area's hot, humid summers and frequent thunderstorms, with construction beginning in 1986. The building sits on 66 acres in St. Petersburg's Midtown community, on land that was formerly the Gas Plant district — an African-American neighborhood of roughly 800 residents, small businesses, and three churches. It opened March 3, 1990, as the Florida Suncoast Dome, at a cost of approximately $138 million. No major-league club played there for eight years.

What the Building Did

On the final day of the 2011 regular season, Evan Longoria hit a walk-off home run in the 12th inning against the Yankees, capping a comeback that clinched the Rays' AL Wild Card berth. The ball passed through a cut-out section of the left-field fence originally designed so Carl Crawford could rob home runs.

The park was also the site of MLB's first instant replay overturn, on September 19, 2008, when a Carlos Peña fly ball originally ruled a ground-rule double was reviewed and changed to a home run.

Three Names

The building has worn three names. The Florida Suncoast Dome became the ThunderDome in 1993, when the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning arrived. In October 1996, a naming-rights deal with Tropicana Dole Beverages gave it the name it carries now. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays played their first game on March 31, 1998 — an 11–6 loss to the Detroit Tigers before a crowd of 45,369. Wade Boggs hit the first home run in franchise history that afternoon, and his 3,000th career hit, also a home run, came here in 1999. Both landing spots in the right-field seats are marked with golden seats and plaques. Behind the right-center field wall, a 10,000-gallon tank opened in 2006 holds live cownose rays — the only professional sports facility in the world that is also home to them.

The 2026 season is the 29th major-league season at this park.

Reporting: MLB.com, Wikipedia. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.

By the Desk · filed 2026-07-24 — the piece reads as of its filing; the park record around it is live · every fact in this piece comes from a filed, sourced research pack and clears an independent fact-check, and nothing is edited after filing.

The dimensions

Fence distances from home plate, in feet — the same venue.fieldInfo the scorecards draw their hit charts on.

Left field line	315′
Left field	370′
Left-center	410′
Center field	404′
Right-center	404′
Right field	370′
Right field line	322′

Home club

TB Tampa Bay Rays

Games we’ve scored here

72 games at this park in our books — every one transcribed mark for mark, reconciled to the official line. The most recent:

…and 60 more in the scorecard archive.

Where it stands

One Tropicana Drive, St. Petersburg, FL 33705. Open the map →

Sources

MLB StatsAPI · as of 2026-07-23
Retrosheet · as of 2026-07-23

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.